Honey Don't (2025)

Honey Don’t (2025)

3/10

Starring           

Margaret Qualley

Aubrey Plaza

Chris Evans

Charlie Day

 

Directed by Ethan Coen

 

Honey Don’t is begging you, please do not see it, and I will advise you listen.

Honey Don’t is empty at the core, a movie of many parts that do not stitch together cleanly to make you feel like you just watched a movie. How is this a dark comedy detective movie, when the comedy is missing and the detecting is lazy? Everything just seems to fall into Honey’s lap as she goes about trying to solve the three cases on her desk, which are all happening concurrently.

One thing this movie got right is the neo-noir part. Other than that, everything, every character, just felt like a fever dream of a director who wants to see the characters have meaningless sex all the time, which does not move the story forward.

The movie is directed and written by Ethan Coen, and he dropped the ball past the center of the earth with this one. Not only does it fail to pace well, but you can also tell after like twenty minutes that you have wasted your time seeing it.

The plot is about a private investigator named Honey.

Here are the moving parts: she is investigating the death of one of her clients, who has a tie to a religious cult led by Chris Evans. While she is on this investigation, she is approached by a man who asks her to investigate his boyfriend because he believes he is cheating. Then, while juggling these two cases, her niece gets kidnapped, and she is also trying to solve that.

All the characters in this movie are vague and empty, making it hard for you to connect or feel any form of empathy. Then the movie does that nonsense of trying to throw you off the scent of what is actually happening by introducing a new character (Honey’s dad), who has nothing to do with what is going on or adding anything at all.

In the end, I just wished I had done something better with my time than seeing this movie because I could not put together any reason why Coen chose to direct it this way. The acting performances are overshadowed by the vagueness of the characters the cast had to play. Then the ending reveal, which is meant to be some form of eye-opening excitement, felt like a dud compared to the meaningless emptiness I had just been dragged through.